It would be a waste. Beltik wouldn’t be in it, and there was no one else as good as he. Kentucky was nothing in chess. Standing naked in the bathroom, she started going through the Levenfish Variation of the Sicilian, squinting her eyes and picturing the pieces on an imaginary board. She did the first dozen moves without a mistake, although the pieces didn’t stand out as clearly as they had a year before. She hesitated after move eighteen, where Black played pawn to knight four and got equality. Smyslov-Botvinnik, 1958. She tried to play out the rest of it, but her head was aching, and after stopping to take two aspirin, she wasn’t sure where the pawns were supposed to be. But she had gotten the first eighteen moves right. She would stay sober today and play tomorrow. When she won the state championship for the second time two years before, it had been simple. After herself and maybe Harry, there weren’t any really strong players in Kentucky. Goldmann and Sizemore were no problem.
When the phone rang again she told Ed Spencer she’d be there at nine-thirty. A half-hour would be plenty of time for pictures.
In the back of her mind she had hoped Townes might show up with a camera, but there was no sign of him. The man from Louisville wasn’t there either. She posed at Board One for a woman photographer from the Herald-Leader, did a three-minute interview with a man from a local television station, and excused herself to go out for a walk around the block before the tournament began. She had managed to get through the day before without drinking and had slept soundly enough with the help of three green pills, but her stomach felt queasy. It was still morning but the sun was too bright; she found herself beginning to sweat after one turn around the block. Her feet hurt. Eighteen years old, and she felt like forty. She would have to stop drinking. Her first opponent was somebody named Foster with a rating in the 1800s. She would be playing Black, but it should be easy—especially if he tried pawn to king four and let her get into the Sicilian.
Foster seemed calm enough, considering that he was playing the U.S. Champion in his first round. He had the good sense not to open with the king pawn against her. He played pawn to queen four, and she decided to avoid the Queen’s Gambit and try to lead him into unfamiliar territory with the Dutch Defense. That meant pawn to king bishop four. They went through the book moves for a while until, somehow, she found herself getting into the Stonewall Formation. It was a position she did not particularly like, and after she started considering the way the board looked she began to feel annoyed with herself. The thing to do was break it open and go for Foster’s throat. She had just been diddling with him, and she wanted to get this over with. Her head was still aching, and she felt uncomfortable even in the good swivel chair. There were too many spectators in the room. Foster was a pale blond in his twenties; he made his moves with a prissy carefulness that was maddening. After the twelfth she looked at the tight position on the board and quickly pushed a center pawn up for sacrifice; she would open up the game and start threatening. She must have a good 600 rating points on this creep; she would wipe him out, get a good lunch and some coffee, and be ready for Goldmann or Sizemore in the afternoon.
Somehow the pawn sacrifice had been hasty. After Foster took with a knight instead of the pawn she had planned on, she found she had either to defend or to drop another pawn. She bit her lip, annoyed, and looked for something to terrorize him with. But she could find nothing. And her mind was working with damnable slowness. She retreated a bishop to protect the pawn.
Foster raised his eyebrows slightly at that and brought a rook over to the queen file, the one she had opened with her pawn sacrifice. She blinked. She did not like the way this was going. Her headache was getting worse. She got up from the board, went to the director and asked him for aspirin. He found some somewhere, and she took three, chasing them with water from a paper cup, before she went back to Foster. As she walked through the main tournament room people looked up from their games to stare at her. She was suddenly angry that she had agreed to play in this third-rate tournament, and angry that she had to go back and contend with Foster. She hated the situation: if she beat him, it was meaningless to her, and if he beat her, she would look terrible. But he wouldn’t beat her. Benny Watts couldn’t beat her, and some prissy graduate student from Louisville wasn’t about to drive her into a corner. She would find a combination somewhere and tear him apart with it.
But there was no combination to be found. She kept staring at the position as it changed gradually from move to move, and it did not open up for her. Foster was good—clearly better than his rating showed—but he wasn’t that good. The people who filled the little room watched in silence as she went more and more on the defensive, trying to keep her face from showing the alarm that was beginning to dominate her moves. And what was wrong with her mind? She hadn’t had a drink for a day and two nights. What was wrong? In the pit of her stomach she was beginning to feel terrified. If she had somehow damaged her talent…
And then, on the twenty-third move, Foster began a series of trades in the center of the board, and she found herself unable to stop it, watching her pieces disappear with a sick feeling in her stomach, watching her position become more and more stark in its deterioration. She found herself playing out a lost game, overwhelmed by the two-pawn advantage of a player with a rating of 1800. There was nothing she could do about it. He would queen a pawn and humiliate her with it.
She lifted her king from the board before he could do it and left the room without looking at him, pushing her way through a crowd of people, avoiding their eyes, almost holding her breath, going out into the main room and up to the desk.
“I’m feeling ill,” she told the director. “I’m going to have to drop out.”
She walked up Main, heavy-footed and in turmoil, trying not to think about the game. It was horrible. She had allowed this tournament to be a test for her—the kind of rigged test an alcoholic makes for himself—and still she had failed it. She must not drink when she got home. She must read and play chess and get herself together. But the thought of going to the empty house was frightening. What else could she do? There was nothing she wanted to do and no one to call. The game she had lost was inconsequential and the tournament was nothing, but the humiliation was overwhelming. She did not want to hear discussions about how she had lost to Foster, did not want to see Foster himself again. She must not drink. She had a real tournament coming up in California in five months. What if she had already done it to herself? What if she had shaved away from the surface of her brain whatever synaptic interlacings had formed her gift? She remembered reading somewhere that some pop artist once bought an original drawing by Michelangelo—and had taken a piece of art gum and erased it, leaving blank paper. The waste had shocked her. Now she felt a similar shock as she imagined the surface of her own brain with the talent for chess wiped away.
At home she tried a Russian game book, but she couldn’t concentrate. She started going through her game with Foster, setting the board up in the kitchen, but the moves of it were too painful. That damned Stonewall, and the hastily pushed pawn. A patzer’s move. Bad chess. Hungover chess. The telephone rang, but she didn’t answer. She sat at the board and wished for a moment, painfully, that she had someone to call. Harry Beltik would be back in Louisville. And she didn’t want to tell him about the game with Foster. He would find out soon enough. She could call Benny. But Benny had been icy after Paris, and she did not want to talk to him. There was no one else. She got up wearily and opened the cabinet next to the refrigerator, took down a bottle of white wine and poured herself a glassful. A voice inside her cried out at the outrage, but she ignored it. She drank half of it in one long swallow and stood waiting until she could feel it. Then she finished the glass and poured another. A person could live without chess. Most people did.